


some things you just can't speak about

by CountingNothings



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: (that's a lie this is the Korean War - everything hurts), Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Charles being the best version of himself, F/F, Literal Sleeping Together, M/M, Mutual Pining, Polyamory Negotiations, everyone is bi and nothing hurts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-12 09:07:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28632987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CountingNothings/pseuds/CountingNothings
Summary: In a way, they’ve been sleeping together since BJ arrived in Korea, only now it’s hard to really differentiate “my tentmate sometimes holds me when I have nightmares” from “co-sleeping with my partner almost makes this entire goddamn war worth it.” Especially since Peg seems to think that the answer to the Problem of Hawkeye is to sleep together in a more metaphorical sense.(rated for language and the canon-typical gore)
Relationships: B. J. Hunnicutt/Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce, Peg Hunnicutt/Original Female Character(s) (minor)
Comments: 14
Kudos: 60





	some things you just can't speak about

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from Taylor Swift’s “epiphany” because I am absolute trash and because I couldn’t not; it’s too perfect. Most of the action is set sometime in early season seven, maybe? The chronology of canon (11 seasons for a 3-year war??) makes no sense so I haven’t felt inclined to be particularly careful.

BJ awakes sometime in the wee hours of his third morning in Korea in a cold sweat, tangled in his own bedsheets. On the other side of the stove, Frank Burns’ cot is regulation-tight; BJ can almost make out the hospital corners. It’s a small mercy that Burns isn’t there to tell him that good little soldiers don’t get nightmares.

On the other side of the still that holds the ghost of Trapper John, when BJ turns to look, is a quietly awake Hawkeye, eyes twin specks of light in the pre-dawn darkness.

“You okay?” Hawkeye asks, in the same voice he uses in post-op when a half-sewn-up kid is just waking up from a morphine haze. In the same voice he used when he put the flat of his hand of BJ’s back and dragged him to safety that first, horrifying afternoon.

BJ shrugs, and finds himself shaking his head.

“You wanna talk about it?” Hawkeye’s only half sitting up, a relaxed, open posture that says “I’ll get up if you need me,” but doesn’t put any pressure on the sentiment. BJ feels the ever-present gratitude surge a little higher.

“Not really,” he whispers back. “Don’t want to bring it into the day with me.”

“You can go back to sleep, you know. We aren’t scheduled for a few more hours.”

BJ makes a kind of twisting motion with his hands and his face, something that he hopes conveys his uncertainty at the possibility of getting back to sleep. Hawkeye watches him with a careful, practiced eye, and seems to come to a decision.

He sits up, swinging his long legs out over the edge of his cot, and pads over to crouch next to BJ’s. “I’m here,” he says, and it’s so soft. Hawkeye has this immense capacity for softness that’s the worst-kept secret in Korea, BJ thinks, warmth spreading slowly through him.

“I won’t let anything happen while you sleep,” Hawkeye assures him, and his hand comes up to brush BJ’s hair off his forehead. Against his will, BJ feels his eyelids growing heavy.

“C’mere,” he murmurs, and holds out his arms. He isn’t really awake enough to tell how long Hawkeye hesitates, but as he drifts off again he can feel that he has an angular body pressed up against his own in the too-small cot, a sharp nose in his cheek. He doesn’t dream.

When he wakes again, his left arm is a little numb from where he’s got the bicep snuggled under Hawkeye’s ribs and the forearm bent up over his back. Hawkeye is breathing softly and evenly, and BJ has the sudden urge to press a kiss to the top of his head. He doesn’t. He wants to, but he doesn’t, and isn’t that the story of so much of his life?

“Hawk,” he whispers, aware that the camp is waking up and that they should be, too.

Hawkeye mutters darkly and buries his face in BJ’s shoulder and the impulse to kiss him becomes just a little harder to ignore.

“Hawk, seriously,” he tries again, using his not-trapped arm to gently shake Hawkeye’s shoulder. “We gotta get up and get going. You’ve put my arm to sleep, and I kinda need that.”

Hawkeye is sitting up in a flash, dark eyes bright with anxiety.

“Beej,” he whispers in something like horror, “Oh, god, I’m sorry.”

“About the arm? The feeling’ll come back soon, and, hey, if it doesn’t, I know a talented surgeon or two who might be able to help me out.”

“Sure,” Hawkeye says, scrambling from the cot. He won’t look BJ in the eye. “Sure, yeah, I think we could even convince Frank to hack it off if we told him it would help the war effort.”

“That’s the spirit,” BJ grins, but Hawkeye’s back is turned, yanking on his clothes in some kind of hurry. As he’s leaving, he half-turns so he’s kind of looking in BJ’s direction, only not. “I’m so sorry,” he says, and then he’s gone, probably to self-flagellate some more.

It’s amazing, BJ thinks, how much you can know about someone you met less than a week ago, how in tune you can be to their habits. Does war do this to everyone, or is it just to him, or is it just to him when it comes to Hawkeye?

He glances at his watch. There’s still an hour before he really needs to be cleaned and scraped and into the mess tent: just enough time to get some of these thoughts down on paper. Peg will know what to do with them, he thinks. It took him a not insignificant amount of time to get to know her reactions to things, but he thinks he knows them well enough now to know that she’ll have something sensible to say about all of this – this warmth in his chest, this _knowing_.

“Dear Peg,” he begins. “I think you’re going to get really tired of hearing about Benjamin Franklin Pierce, but I don’t think he’s going to leave my head any time soon.”

*

“Dear BJ,” begins Peg’s next letter, which he receives three weeks later along with two others that are hopefully responses to the latest developments, i.e., his reluctant admission to himself and to her that what he’s infected with is a crush the likes of which he hasn’t had in years.

“Just a quick note for today; I have some more newsy updates that I’ll save for the weekend, when your parents come to pick up Erin for the day and I have a whole afternoon to figure out how to fit our lives onto regulation-sized paper for you.

“Here’s what’s obvious to me: you have a big heart, and you shouldn’t be afraid to use it. It sounds to me like it might be needed. Other, similarly large parts of you might also be put to good use in the present situation. I suspect that, if not exactly needed, they will be appreciated. I myself will appreciate a full report, please and thank you.

“All of my love,  
Your Peg.”

*

The trouble is, BJ thinks, after the receipt of the fifth or sixth such letter, that he doesn’t exactly know if the various parts of himself that Peg mentions _will_ be appreciated. Just about every time Frank pulls the overnight shift in post-op, regardless of whether BJ’s had a nightmare, Hawkeye ends up in his bed or he ends up in Hawkeye’s. And just about every morning after, Hawkeye walks away from him like he’s just committed some mortal sin ( _adultery_ , BJ’s mind helpfully supplies). He’s stopped apologising, thankfully, but he hasn’t stopped looking like a kicked dog.

The days and nights between are so regular it’s painful: the laughter and the joking, the pranks, the drinking, the way Hawkeye leans into his space and presses against him and _looks_ at him. No glimpse of the peaceful sleeper breathing onto BJ’s neck. No trace of the hunted man who has woken up in a bed he feels he doesn’t belong in.

BJ doesn’t really blame Hawkeye; Peg’s encouragement notwithstanding, it feels wrong to him, too. Except for the moments when it feels so goddamn right, which is almost all of them, and sometimes the wrongness and the rightness are easy to disentangle, and sometimes they seem like two sides of the same cursed coin. BJ has been in Korea for three months, and the mind-numbing senselessness of it all is creeping inside of him.

Frank Burns goes AWOL and gets sent home. Hawkeye cries himself to sleep into BJ’s t-shirt every night for a week.

“You know,” Hawkeye says at one point, when they’ve just gotten the news that Frank’s replacement will arrive within a few days, “I’m not even mad that he got to go home and I didn’t – the man was a menace here, probably hurt more kids than he saved. I’m just so tired, Beej. I’ve been here a year, but it feels like a lifetime.”

BJ doesn’t have an answer to that, so he leans his weight into Hawkeye until he feels the answering pressure. Across the mess hall table from them, Father Mulcahy pretends he isn’t listening. BJ hasn’t been here a year, but he already can’t remember what it’s like to be unobserved. Sitting next to Hawkeye doesn’t exactly help – the man is a sponge for attention, soaks it up greedily – but there’s really nowhere else that BJ can think to be.

*

“My darling BJ,” begins a letter that arrives along with Charles Emerson Winchester III to put an end to the comforting domesticity of sleeping every night with Hawkeye curled around his ribs, “I just want to say that I’m disappointed you haven’t followed through on any of my suggestions.”

She proceeds to describe just how invested she is in “the daily will-they, won’t-they melodrama of your friend and his lover,” and implies in language so strong BJ isn’t certain how it got past the censors that she’s had good fun imagining a number of scenarios in which the whole thing might come out.

Her ringing endorsement is touching, but BJ isn’t certain how he feels about it, himself.

Yes, his raging crush on the man who over the past few months has become his closest friend is unabated; if anything, it’s only gotten stronger as he and Hawkeye have gotten to know each other better. Yes, waking up with Hawkeye in his arms is, for the brief, blissful seconds before he remembers where they are, the best part of his day.

Yes, the unavoidable morning hardness he sometimes gets to feel, heavy and hot against his hip or his thigh, is testing his self-control almost as much as the way Hawkeye laughs when he thinks BJ’s told a particularly funny joke, almost as much as that righteous rage Hawkeye lets out from time to time.

In short, BJ is absolutely fucked, and Peg, bless her, is encouraging him to actually _get_ fucked, but this doesn’t feel like something he’ll be able to stop doing once he starts. Like leaning into Hawkeye’s body at every opportunity, like reading while serving as a yarn winding-aid, like scrubbing up before surgery together and showering after surgery together, like sleeping with Hawkeye’s hair tickling his nose – BJ is afraid that if he follows Peg’s advice, he’ll want to do it forever.

And they don’t have forever, do they? They have until this war ends or Hawkeye’s tour is over, whichever comes first. Sure, Peg is supportive now, but what would she do if BJ brought Hawkeye home to Mill Valley and said, “Can I keep him?”

*

There’s a war on, or a police action, or whatever they’re supposed to call it. It makes for lapses in judgement: a star kicker whose perforated bowel they miss in the haste to reconnect the arteries in his leg; a particularly nasty batch of gin that Colonel Potter makes them dump out for fear it’ll blind them all. A night when BJ forgets that he’s meant to relieve Charles in post-op at 0300 until Charles comes seething in to get him from where he’s passed out against Hawkeye’s angular chest.

To his credit, Charles says only, “I came in here to demand that we switch places, Hunnicutt, but I suspect my pillow is a great deal softer than yours,” and so softly that Hawkeye doesn’t wake. His arms tighten around BJ only briefly before slackening and sliding off to land with soft thuds on the blankets.

“Thank you,” BJ whispers. Charles does not respond, but he holds BJ’s eyes, and he nods, once, ever so slowly.

*

After 10 hours in surgery, with casualties still arriving, Potter sets them on catnap rotations. Finish a patient, take twenty on a cot in the scrub room. Margaret does the same with the nurses, although there are more of them, so they go off in twos to Potter’s office.

More than once, BJ wakes before his time because Charles or Potter has slipped into the scrub room to crumple onto the cot beside him. He never wakes when it’s Hawkeye, not until the orderly keeping time for them all shakes him. When he comes in and Hawkeye’s asleep, BJ keeps himself from collapsing directly onto the other man’s shoulder, but always when Hawkeye extricates himself, BJ is awake enough to find that they are more intimately tangled than he intended.

By 27 hours, the flow has slowed enough that Potter sets them on two-on, two-off rotating shifts of three hours apiece. Hawkeye volunteers to take the first on-shift. It’s second nature for BJ to join him, and would be even if Hawkeye wasn’t Hawkeye. Potter is limping, and Charles looks like he’s aged about a decade.

“Bless you, son,” Potter says, to one or the other of them or possibly to both. “Winchester and I’ll relieve you in three hours. Godspeed and good luck.”

“God, I wish I were dead,” Hawkeye says conversationally. “Twenty minutes of sleep at a time is worse than no sleep at all.”

“Just think,” BJ tells him, “in three hours, we’ll have a whole bunch of twenty minutes to pay off our dreamland admission fee.”

“Your bunk or mine?” Hawkeye asks, and when BJ looks across the bodies at him he’s grinning beneath his mask, in a way that is probably supposed to come across as rakish but BJ knows is there to serve as plausible deniability in case BJ wants to sleep alone.

“Yours is closer to the door,” BJ says, too tired to figure out how to hide it in witty repartee.

Hawkeye’s head tilts down, but his shoulders relax, just a little.

When Charles and Potter come in looking like death warmed over, Hawkeye and BJ do the barest minimum of cleanup, shedding blood-soaked gowns and gloves and masks and washing their hands thoroughly but without scrubbing.

They don’t talk as they make their way back to the Swamp, but they sit together on the edge of Hawkeye’s bed and take off their boots and their belts, and then Hawkeye bullies them under the covers and turns his back to let BJ curl around him.

When they wake to go relieve the B-team, for once Hawkeye doesn’t look like he’s about to meet a firing squad, and it’s the best thing to happen in a day and a half.

*

Civilian casualties are always the worst. A new nurse – one who’ll soon be rotated out, if the death rays emanating from Margaret’s eyes are any indication – is crying into her surgical mask.

“We didn’t cover this in med school,” she’s saying, and BJ wants to comfort her, to tell her they hadn’t covered it in his med school, either, and that meatball surgery was something you made up as you went along, but he’s too busy trying to calculate the proper anaesthesia mix for a very pregnant woman whose chest wound may render the whole thing inconsequential anyway.

“Beej,” Hawkeye says, in that calm, steady, surgery-ready voice of his, “we just about set down there?”

BJ nods. “Send up a prayer for us, will you, Father?” he calls out, knowing that Mulcahy is around without having to look. The priest seems to always be just where he’s needed, which is in itself something of a blessing.

“Right you are,” Mulcahy says, and BJ can feel Mulcahy coming up behind him, the warmth of human life at his back.

“Putting her under,” he announces, and applies the mask with all the delicacy he has in him.

Later, when the woman is in post-op under Charles’ watchful eye and Father Mulcahy has retreated to the officer’s club and Hawkeye is whispering, “We did it Beej; we saved them both” into the hollow space beneath BJ’s chin, BJ will feel again this unreal pulse of relief that they are here, in his bed, after working miracles together.

Hawkeye’s breathing will slow, but BJ will still be awake, wondering if the reason they fit so perfectly together, whatever it is, will disappear if the war ever ends.

*

“I don’t think you have to worry,” Peg tells him in her next letter. “BJ, it really sounds like these friendships you’re making will last an eternity. And if you let the fear that they won’t keep you from loving your friends the way I know you to be capable of, well, nothing short of your dying would make me sadder.”

*

Hawkeye brings a girl back to the tent. Hawkeye seduces a girl into the supply room. Hawkeye goes and falls in love with a girl raising orphans in the bombed-out shell of her house.

BJ does none of these things, and perhaps it’s because he’s got Peg’s permission (Peg’s goading voice in his ear, Peg’s enthusiasm vibrating off the page) so he doesn’t have guilt to drown, but perhaps it’s because he’s always been a one-woman man. Perhaps it’s because, for all the boys he was confused over when he was a boy and for all the men he’s been interested in since, Peg’s always been it for him, the one woman who saved him from a lifetime of discreet shame by being the kind of person he could fall in love with, gender notwithstanding.

“I love you,” he writes to her, while Hawkeye is trying to convince him to leave the Swamp, newly-arrived nurse imminent. “I would say I wish you were here, but I wouldn’t wish here on my worst enemy. But I miss you something fierce, Peg.”

Hawkeye strikes out with some pretty lieutenant and is inconsolable about it, but when he ends up in BJ’s bed all the same, it’s hard to feel jealous. It’s hard, too, to stop from reaching under his scruffy chin and tilting his head up for a kiss. It’s hard to stop from thinking about what it would feel like to take Peg’s advice and give Hawkeye a reason to stop chasing, stop moving.

How hot would they burn, together? BJ swears he can already feel the flame licking out at him. Is it the kind of fire that could survive crossing an ocean, living a continent apart, seeing each other at conferences and on holidays?

Peg thinks it could, thinks it will. If BJ’s honest with himself, he thinks so, too.

But Hawkeye’s not a one-woman man. His one woman from back in med school had wanted a commitment that he couldn’t make, and BJ doesn’t know if he could handle being with Hawkeye knowing that Hawkeye might leave him at any moment because something more important – or, if he’s being uncharitable, something more interesting – comes along.

These thoughts seem to be always buzzing in BJ’s head, but then Hawkeye will read to him aloud from the Crabapple Cove Gazette, or will put all his bacon on BJ’s plate, or will pick up the thread of BJ’s joke in surgery and set the whole team laughing. And in the face of this relentless affection, BJ’s doubts will get a little quieter.

*

“Violet’s lease was up,” Peg tells him. “And you know that dingy little place she was living – San Fran rents these days are much too high! So I said to her, gee, Vi, you’re here all the time anyway, and I could use the help with Erin, why don’t you just move in? What do you think about that, honey?”

BJ thinks that’s a pretty stellar plan, and he says so. “I love that we can support each other,” he writes, “getting the love and comfort that we need. I can’t wait for us all to be one big family again.”

“Make it happen,” says the next letter. “If I took the plunge, so can you. Family is important, BJ, and so is love and comfort and all the other nice things you’re happy I’m getting. I want you to bring some of that home with you, when you come home. Don’t leave all those chances at happiness in Korea.”

BJ doesn’t want to disappoint her, but with every passing day, it feels harder and harder to invite Hawkeye to metaphorically move in with him. How do you say to someone, “I want to kiss you” or, worse, “I want to keep you” – how do you trust that all the ways someone makes you feel wanted and loved are actually that? Hawkeye is transparent, sometimes, in his desire, but BJ feels like he’s been pretty transparent, too, and Hawkeye hasn’t called him on a single thing.

Every time he crawls into Hawkeye’s bed, he promises himself, _I’ll tell him in the morning. I’ll kiss him and I’ll tell him I love him._ And every morning, he watches Hawkeye’s face go from soft half-wakefulness to the hangdog shame that he tries so ineffectually to cover, and he doesn’t say anything.

This war has been an exercise in learning to love without being needed, and he’s been pretty bad at it so far. “Will Peg still need me when I come home?” and “Will I still need Hawkeye when I go home?” sometimes feel like the same question, and no matter how carefully he tries to disentangle need from all the rest of it, it’s still there, this raw place inside of him that needs Hawkeye like whole blood or morphine or an amputation.

Why is it so hard to think that the love will still be there when the need is gone? Peg seems to still love him, and her need for him is less every day. Why is it that he can’t trust the way Hawkeye makes him feel, already, without even trying, to bridge that gap? The answer goes thudding through him, hard on the heels of the question, every time: Loving Hawkeye, need or no, is consuming him already. Letting Hawkeye love him back would be an inferno of the highest order. The kind you can’t keep secret. The kind everyone in their right mind wants to put out.

If he doesn’t say anything, he gets to keep what little he has, even when he goes home, even when the need is gone. It’s selfish, and he knows it, but they’re at war. A little selfishness isn’t entirely out of place in this man’s army.

*

On the afternoon when it all goes to hell, Radar is being squirrelly. He’s in their tent for mail call, which is going spectacularly so far: a letter from Charles’ mother dropped on the ground (and stepped on, as Charles and Radar both scrambled to retrieve it); Hawkeye’s latest nudist magazine looking incredibly well-thumbed (there’s a page missing, torn clean out, and Hawkeye is yelling about it, something about volleyball).

When Radar finally pulls out a letter for BJ, he’s so casual about it that all three of them immediately know something is up.

“I didn’t open it, if that’s what you mean!” Radar squawks in the middle of a Winchester rant about the help. BJ rounds on him.

“Radar, ‘didn’t open it’ and ‘didn’t read it’ are two separate things, you know.”

“Yeah, Radar,” Hawkeye adds, leaning a little too close to the letter for BJ’s comfort. “Don’t you know it’s a federal crime to read someone else’s juicy mail and not tell me about it?”

“Gee!” Radar blanches. “You sirs aren’t gonna report me, are you?”

“Just hand over the letter, and no one gets hurt,” Hawkeye says. His golf club-cum-fencing foil is outstretched, a Musketeer pose missing only a cape.

“I believe that’s my line,” BJ interjects. The letter is obviously from Peg, and Radar has obviously read it, and while their code may fool the army censors, it’s probably just clear enough to Radar that the boy is getting ideas. If Hawkeye, who knows BJ better than anyone, gets his hands on it, that’s the end of everything.

BJ reaches around Hawkeye to grab the letter, but Radar won’t let it go, is still too caught in his own confusion to just end this scene and let them try to restore some equanimity.

“Okay,” says Hawkeye, slowly, eyes moving between BJ and Radar and the letter they’re both clutching. He's still smiling, but his tone is edging toward serious. “What’s in this letter that’s so fascinating?”

“Radar,” BJ warns.

“Radar,” Hawkeye mimics. “Spill the beans, we’re dying to know.”

“Nuh-uh,” Radar manages. “Sir, I don’t know if you wanna read this letter. I think your wife might have the wrong idea about some stuff, and it…well, it might upset you.”

He eases the letter from BJ’s grip. “I wasn’t gonna deliver it, you see –”

“Because you read it,” BJ finishes for him. He reaches out for the letter with one hand and Radar’s collar with the other. Radar dodges, BJ lunges again, and in the ensuing scuffle somehow the letter, and Hawkeye, end up perched at the far end of the tent, on the floor past BJ’s bunk.

“Hawk,” BJ starts, unsure if he wants to plead for Hawkeye not to read the letter, or to just cut to the chase and start packing for the move out of the Swamp he’s sure Hawkeye will demand, after this.

“Radar, I think you’d better go,” Hawkeye says, and his voice is the soft, coiled deadliness of a desert rattler. Radar goes.

“I’m stepping out,” Charles informs everyone who’s listening, which is no one. “I expect your childish antics to be finished by the time I return.”

BJ wants to join him. Instead, he makes his way over to his bed, sits, swings his feet around so they’re next to Hawkeye’s knees.

“So what is it,” Hawkeye asks, and he’s not looking at BJ, but his voice, his small, quiet voice, cuts into a part of BJ that he doesn’t think anyone’s ever seen. “You’ve been willingly torturing us both, or maybe just me? You don’t care enough about me to put me out of my misery one way or the other? You’re too _scared_ , BJ? What is it? Because it's apparently _not_ that you're in an exclusive relationship with your wife.”

“I don’t know, Hawk.” The words jump out of him, unbidden, and not even remotely the right thing to say. Hawkeye still won’t look at him, and the desire to have this conversation at each other rather than with each other is not one BJ shares.

“Wanna give it your best shot, cowboy?” If it hadn’t been clear before that Hawkeye was hurting, the vicious sarcasm is the incontrovertible clue.

“God, Hawk,” he tries. There is something climbing up his throat and he thinks it might be tears. He hasn’t even articulated it to himself, for God’s sake, not properly, anyway.

“I…" He sucks in a breath, steels himself, goes for it like he'd go after shrapnel in a belly wound. "I sometimes feel like I’m drowning, okay, or burning up, like loving you the way I do is going to swallow me whole, and I don’t know how to deal with that!” Now that he’s started, he can’t seem to stop. He tells Hawkeye about the boy he kissed in high school and the men he fucked in med school and the love he has for Peg that grew and grew, and how what he feels for Hawkeye doesn’t enter anywhere into the realm of his experience.

“I started loving you the hour I met you,” he says, and can hear the anguish in his own voice, “and every time I think I can’t love you more, I do. God, I do. What am I supposed to do with all of this feeling, Hawk? How can I even talk about it – how can I even think about it without losing myself completely?”

“You make loving me sound like a bad thing.”

BJ can’t help himself; he slides to the floor and bunches his leg up against Hawkeye’s, and something in him eases, just a little, when he feels Hawkeye pressing back.

“It’s not,” he whispers. “It’s not a bad thing, it’s just so much of a good thing that it scares me.”

“Because you think I might drown you.”

“Hawkeye.”

“No, no, I’m just trying to understand, Beej. I’m trying to understand what in God’s name you’re so afraid of that you’ve let me spend months waking up next to you and feeling like the absolute dog shit on the bottom of some cosmic boot for taking advantage of you.”

BJ can’t help it; his brain is screaming _defuse, defuse_ at him; he says, “Maybe you should have actually been taking advantage of me” and regrets it almost instantly because Hawkeye’s eyes finally, _finally_ snap to his, and their pupils are blown so wide, BJ feels like falling.

“How fucking _dare_ you,” Hawkeye hisses. “I have been so good, I have exercised more self-control than I thought I had, and you…you gave me not one single sign, Beej. I –”

He cuts himself off as BJ knocks their foreheads together, hand heavy on the back of Hawkeye’s neck to hold him there. “I’m sorry,” BJ breathes, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“What do we do now, Beej?” Hawkeye asks, his voice the kind of raw that BJ never wants to hear again. It isn’t forgiveness, but it’s a hand stuck out in the middle, and BJ will take it. He knows, has known since the beginning, how to step into every opening Hawkeye leaves, as easy as water flowing downstream.

“Well, Peg has some pretty specific ideas…”

He’s rewarded by the clear, beautiful sound of Hawkeye’s incredulous laughter, by the feel of it against him, puffing against his mouth, shaking against his leg, Hawkeye’s instinctive move to throw his head back pressing his neck against BJ’s hand.

“That’s another thing I’m trying to understand,” Hawkeye says when he’s caught his breath. “How it is that Peg is so willing to share you. Some days, I swear, I’m jealous of the air for getting to be pulled into your lungs.”

It’s too much; it’s too much, this sudden swerve back into serious territory, this confession that whatever uniquely terrible thing is consuming him is consuming Hawkeye, too, so BJ does the only thing he can think to do and tilts his head to lunge after Hawkeye’s mouth. It is not a nice kiss: it is violent, almost, and messy, with too many teeth, and it’s too dry and too firm and too utterly desperate, but Hawkeye makes this _sound_ before he rips himself away.

He opens his mouth, and BJ is terrified of what will come out, so he scrabbles, desperate, and blurts out, “Will it help if you read the letters?”

“God, Beej,” Hawkeye says, eyes wide and a little terrified. “There are _letters_ , plural?”

“I’m so sorry,” BJ says again, and reaches under his bed to pull at the battered little box where he keeps every line Peg’s written him and every little drawing from Erin.

*

Hawkeye reads the letters, and paces. BJ sits cross-legged on his bunk, re-reading and sorting into piles: about Hawkeye, not about Hawkeye. He includes a few about Violet, because they helped him, and maybe they’ll help Hawkeye, too. When Hawkeye finishes a letter, he holds it out, and BJ replaces it with another, extracted already from its envelope.

Every so often, Hawkeye’s small sounds of distress become words, even whole sentences, most directed at Peg, some at himself. He hasn’t looked at BJ since he started reading, hasn’t addressed him, either.

BJ is trying very hard not to panic and call the whole thing off, shove his incriminating letters into their box and put in for an immediate transfer to literally anywhere else. The fire inside of him is jumping up against his ribs, singeing the back of his throat. But – and here’s the thing he hadn’t expected – he feels warm all over, but he doesn’t feel like he’s crumbling into ash. More like he’s being lit up like some kind of lantern.

He wonders how no one in the camp has come running to see about why he’s glowing.

*

Twenty or so letters in (they’re going to miss dinner, at this rate, but BJ has never been less hungry in his life), Hawkeye finally looks up from a page and down at BJ, and if BJ feels like a lantern, Hawkeye is a whole damn chandelier, incandescent with rage and hope so mixed together that BJ can’t tell which one is winning.

“Since the beginning, Beej – since the _beginning_ ,” Hawkeye says, and his voice is broken glass, sharp and shattered. “And you didn’t tell me? You…you let me think I wasn’t allowed to have this? Over and over, all those…all those nights, all those mornings? How could you not let me have this, without all the guilt – couldn’t you see, can’t you see how it’s been eating me alive? To not get to have you, and to feel like I’m a thief for the crumbs I’ve been scrounging?”

And the thing is, BJ’s known this, because he’s not unperceptive, he’s not completely ignorant, and even if he was either of those things, Hawkeye might just be the most transparent man alive. He’s known this, and he hasn’t known what to do; he’s been paralysed or comatose or just plain trapped in a quagmire of his own making.

“I don’t know how to apologise to you,” he says, and hears the cracks in his own voice. “I don’t know how to be anything but horribly, desperately in love with you, Hawk. I don’t even know how to do anything about it – just feeling it takes up all this messy, messy space, it feels like, it’s felt like, if I let it all tumble out, it’ll ruin everything.

“But,” he continues, and holds out his hands, silently willing Hawkeye to take them, “we’ve cleaned up messes before, you and I, lots of times. I should’ve put my trust in that. I’m not ever going to stop being sorry I haven’t.”

“Yeah,” Hawkeye agrees. He’s staring at BJ’s hands, and when he finally, tentatively, puts his own in them, he looks so lost, so utterly stricken, that BJ can’t help but give him the smallest tug.

Somehow, it’s enough, because Hawkeye is stumbling forward, barking his shin on the edge of BJ’s cot, and somehow by the time he’s toppling into BJ, BJ’s able to catch him, to take the momentum and lay them back. For a long while they just hold each other, and there’s nothing but the familiar heat of this other body that BJ’s had pressed against him, most nights, for months now.

It’s hard to overthink, with Hawkeye’s uneven breathing occupying all the space in his head. There’s just the clarity: I love you. You’re here. It’s like this every time, and why, BJ thinks, has he never taken the opportunity to spill his guts? Why has he always said to himself, _wait until morning_ , when morning brings with it this haze of fear and worry?

Hawkeye’s hands are fisted in BJ’s shirt. Hawkeye’s legs are tangled in BJ’s legs. BJ’s got one arm wrapped as tightly as he can around Hawkeye’s torso, but he loosens it, now, so he can use his other hand to push the hair away from Hawkeye’s face, to cup Hawkeye’s cheek, to close his eyes and lean in and carefully, gently, like he’s wanted since the beginning, to ghost the softest of kisses across Hawkeye’s lips.

Hawkeye gasps like a wounded animal and buries his face in BJ’s shoulder, heaving out giant sobs that, by rights, should have half the camp rushing in with horror. But this is war, and everyone gets to have a little breakdown, sometimes. BJ supposes he should be grateful that he hasn’t hurt Hawkeye more than the war has.

He can’t be sure that he hasn’t, though, so he just says, “Oh, Hawk,” and “I’m so sorry” and “We’re gonna figure this out, it’s gonna be alright” over and over again until his own tears clog his throat too tightly to get the words out anymore.

The sounds of everyone leaving dinner filter into the silence made by both of them returning to normal breathing patterns.

The collar of BJ’s shirt is soaked with both their tears, but Hawkeye doesn’t lift his head from it when he says, “We can’t come back from this, Beej.” His breath is warm on the cool of BJ’s collarbone. His eyelashes are wet where they brush against BJ’s neck. BJ is suddenly, completely present in the moment in a way he hasn’t felt since he got his draft notice; for the first time, he can’t think of a past or a future time he wants to be in instead of this one. For the first time, he’s not dreading anything.

There’s just the slow rush of Hawkeye’s breathing, the whole length of him crumpled across BJ’s body. BJ wraps his arms around Hawkeye as tightly as he can and leans to rest their heads together.

“Good,” he whispers. “Good. I don’t want to go anywhere that doesn’t have you in it.”

Hawkeye shifts, and BJ loosens his arms immediately, momentarily terrified that he’s come on too strong, or that Hawkeye was trying to say that they should never speak again, but all Hawkeye does is loom over him. Plant a hand on either side of his head. Lean down and kiss him like their lives depend on it.

This kiss is greedy, and desperate, and begs for a response, so BJ gives one, because he’s greedy, too, because he doesn’t know how he ever lived without this, because Hawkeye is drinking him in like he’s been parched his whole life and BJ wants nothing more than to be an ocean.

The kiss lasts long, slow minutes that spread warm down BJ’s spine. He is dimly aware of dark falling, of Hawkeye moving from his side to sit astride his hips, of the rasp of stubble against his chin, exactly the kind of grounding harshness that he needs. He is dimly aware, some time or perhaps no time later, of Charles puttering huffily around, the light clicking on, the little grumbling noises that mean they have tried Charles’ patience sufficiently for one day but he is disinclined to get into a fight.

BJ is grateful for it. When he tilts Hawkeye over into the sheets, earning a sharply indrawn breath that he files away for later exploration, he calls softly across the tent, “Thank you, Charles.”

“Hunnicutt,” comes the answering barb, as expected, “I shudder to imagine the deplorable habits where you come from if basic human courtesy is met with such a fuss.”

Hawkeye muffles laughter in BJ’s shoulder, familiar as the rain, and they quake in each other’s arms until the laughter runs out, and all that’s left is the yawning pit of exhaustion.

It, too, is familiar, and it has a natural response: BJ sits up to yank at his shoelaces; Hawkeye wrestles with his belt. Jackets, pants, socks fall by the side of the bed, and BJ falls into a sleep of deep contentment, curled into Hawkeye’s narrow chest.

*

Reveille blows. Charles groans. There are the sounds of his sheets crinkling, his blanket being thrown off. He makes all his usual morning grumbles as he struggles into his robe and rummages around for his shower kit.

“When I return,” he says, casually, in their general direction, “I should like to be able to drink my coffee uninterrupted.” He leaves, the door of the Swamp swinging closed behind him with its own little _clack_.

“I could kiss that man,” Hawkeye says fervently.

“Be reasonable,” BJ tells him, delighted at the glint in Hawkeye’s eye, delighted that they are doing this, they are _doing_ this and yet nothing is changing; he’s getting to keep Hawkeye and he’s getting to keep himself, too, “you’ve already bagged one tentmate; even you can’t have the stamina to try for two right away.”

“Bagged!” Hawkeye squawks, grin splitting his face. “Stamina! I’ll show you stamina, lover!”

“That’s Doctor Lover to you,” BJ says, and leans in to taste the laughter on Hawkeye’s lips. “And you’d better show me stamina. This isn’t Little League, you know.”

Long minutes later, Hawkeye is clenching his fists around BJ’s ribcage and BJ is contemplating whether they have time for anything a little less clothed when Charles’ voice comes wafting across the compound, something to the very loud effect of, “I’m headed back to the Swamp now.” With a little regret, BJ gives Hawkeye one last, lingering kiss, trying to imbue it with all the promise he can, and extricates himself from the tangle they’ve become.

“My blankets look good on you,” he says, as he’s been wanting to say for months now.

“You look good on me,” Hawkeye retorts, and BJ can’t help but duck back down to kiss him once more, twice more, before the sound of the door swinging open brings him back to his senses.

“Gentlemen,” Charles begins, and when BJ rips his eyes from Hawkeye’s to look over, he’s swept with a wave of overwhelming fondness. Charles’ eyes are firmly shut, and his hand is still against the door.

“We’re decent, Charles,” Hawkeye yawns. He still hasn’t climbed out of BJ’s bed. It’s very cute.

“Oh,” says Charles, snapping open his eyes. “Well, there’s a first time for everything I suppose, isn’t there?”

*

In the seven months, two weeks, and four days since BJ had gone to war, Peg Hunnicutt had found out a number of things about herself that she hadn’t previously known. She was very good, for instance, at the kind of rough-and-tumble household maintenance that in her childhood had only ever been doable on weekends, when her father wasn’t working. She had an eye for real estate. She was a fantastic mother. She wrote a mean long-distance love letter. She could help organise a party for a few dozen people she didn’t know but whose loved ones loved her husband.

But even amidst all these new self-discoveries, there were some things about herself that Peg knew to be unchanging, and one of them was that she loved her husband, very much, and wanted him to achieve the fullness of happiness. In the seven months, two weeks, and two days since BJ had met one Benjamin Franklin Pierce, Peg had often found herself worrying that that love, that desire for BJ’s happiness, wasn’t enough for him.

Not that she had doubts about his love for her, or his commitment to come back to her and to Erin! No, never that. Quite the opposite, in fact: she couldn’t understand why his experience of her love and support seemed to be so lacking that he couldn’t use them as a platform to build their little family bigger. (And, she had to admit, to deal with what was probably an awful lot of sexual frustration in a way that wouldn’t leave him guilt-sick in the morning. The man was many things, and “single-minded” was about five of them.)

She had often lamented to Violet, the fiancée of an Army engineer whom she’d met at some Officers’ Wives Social, that men seemed to have no concept of the treasure that was intimacy. Violet had wondered if the problem might not be that BJ was new to the idea of wanting to be intimate with another man, but Peg knew that wasn’t the problem; she’d known BJ in med school, after all, had met him on a number of occasions at the kind of party where people of their sort congregated.

“It’s just that we have such different experiences of this war,” she’d said to Violet, who she’d known would understand. “And I need to be able to talk to someone about what it means to not know if your husband is going to come home, about how to raise a child alone but not really alone – there’s this lingering worry that he’ll come on home and discover I’ve messed up our kid or something crazy like that.”

“I imagine he needs to be able to talk to someone who knows what it means to see and hear and live through all that he’s living through,” Violet had said, because she had, of course, understood.

And they had agreed that talking was only the beginning of it, that humans weren’t made to live in a world without the kind of love that made life worthwhile, without the kind of love that anchored you to the world. And if you were the sort of person who found love in lots of different people, who found more than one anchor in the midst of uncertainty and fear, then weren’t you just a little foolish not to tie your boat up to it?

Seven months, two weeks, and four days into having one of her anchors very far away, Peg called to her rather more proximal anchor as she entered the front door, mail in hand and baby on her hip.

“Letter from BJ, Vi! Shall we all read it together?”

“Be right there!” Violet called, and then she was, with a kiss for Erin’s nose and a rather more thorough kiss for Peg’s lips. Erin laughed and clapped at them, happy as only a baby who senses love all around them can be, and the three of them got a little lost in their togetherness for just a moment.

Peg wondered, as she often did, how BJ would fit into their little picture, how he and Violet would mesh. How Erin, who wanted her daddy so badly without really knowing what a daddy was, would acclimate to him. It would be easier, the thought familiar as the tide, if he brought with him his own little picture; the branching out of their family in multiple directions balancing them, keeping them solid.

“The letter?” Violet said, and tugged Erin out of Peg’s arms and tugged Peg out of her thoughts and into the sitting room.

Their ritual, for the better part of four months: Peg on one side of the couch, Violet and Erin on the other. Peg reading the letter first, hiccupping or giggling or sighing at the bits just for her, then the three of them scooching together to read it through a second time and hear all BJ’s news.

As Violet and Erin settled, Peg slid her nail along the edge of the envelope and slipped out its contents: the usual pages of text, and a small, somewhat blurry, amateur photograph. In it, BJ was clearly pontificating on some ridiculous thing that he was taking seriously – the man’s body language was always a dead giveaway; Lord, but she was fond of him – and another man was looking at him with the softest, widest smile. Peg recognised the other man because of the look. It said, “BJ Hunnicutt, I can’t believe I get to keep you.”

“Vi,” she said, and then, louder, more urgently, “Violet!”

She waved the photo for Violet to take, unfolding the letter with shaking fingers. Was it finally happening? It was finally happening. That photo, that unguarded longing and utter wonder, it couldn’t mean anything else.

“Dear Peg,” she read aloud, because she needed to share this, whether it was the good news she hoped it was or not. “I have lots of news for you, but I’ll tell you the most exciting bit first: my friend finally broke down (your letters helped immensely) and told the object of his affections how he was, well, affected. And, what do you know? His feelings were reciprocated, although he got in a lot of trouble for holding out so long! How many times can I say it – you were right about everything, and I should listen to you always.”

She took a breath, ready to shriek a little, giddy with glee, but Violet interjected before she could make one sound.

“I’d say the feelings are reciprocated – listen, Peggy, the inscription on the back of this photo says ‘Dear Peg, this is so you know your husband is in good hands. Can’t wait to swap horror stories with you! Love, H.’”

“Horror stories indeed!” Peg snorted. “I can’t believe he made that sweet man wait as long as he did.”

She held out her arm for Violet and Erin to snuggle under and turned back to the letter, content in a way she hadn’t felt since BJ’d gone away, delighted in a way she couldn’t remember being very often even before the war. It was good, in this moment, to be alive, to be reading about a love she’d wanted to see come to fruition, to be snuggled up with her two best girls, to know that, whatever happened, all of them were going to make it through, together.


End file.
